Windows Azure is a platform that has you covered, whether you need to write software, run software that is already written, or Install and use “canned” software whether you or someone else wrote it. Like any platform, it’s a set of tools you can use where it makes sense to solve a problem.
You can click on the graphic below for ...

(As with all of these types of posts, check the date of the latest update I’ve made here. Anything older than 6 months is probably out of date, given the speed with which we release new features into Windows and SQL Azure)
I don’t normally like to discuss things in terms of tools. I find that whenever you start with a given tool (or ...

Windows Azure Storage has three primary components - a Queue, a Binary Large Object (BLOB) store (two types of these), and Table Storage.
Storage of data on-premises is fairly well understood - but there components of it that you may not consider. When you move to a distributed architecture, certain factors should be taken into account, such as ...

One of the advantages of using Windows Azure to run your code is that you don’t have to constantly manage upgrades on your platform. While that’s a big advantage indeed, it immediately brings up the question - how do the upgrades happen? Microsoft upgrades the Azure platform in periodic increments, and the components that are affected are ...

Last week Microsoft announced several new offerings for “Big Data” - and since I’m a stickler for definitions, I wanted to make sure I understood what that really means. What is “Big Data”? What size hard drive is that? After all, my laptop has 1TB of storage - is my laptop “Big Data”?
There are actually a few definitions for this term, most ...

The Windows Azure Queue component, like all Windows Azure components (Roles, Storage, App Fabric, SQL Azure) can be used by itself or with other Windows Azure components. That’s why I refer to Windows Azure as “Distributed Computing” rather than “cloud”. Having a distributed off premise queue has a lot of use-cases. An interesting use-case is ...

When you declare and use storage in Windows Azure - specifically in a BLOB object - it’s just a grouping of storage. There are two types of BLOBs - Page and Block. To use storage, you need a storage account, which hold Containers, and then you put a BLOB object in the Container. You address that using the API, which in turn uses a REST call ...

This is one in a series of posts on a Windows Azure Learning Plan. You can find the main post here. This one deals with Storage for Windows Azure.
Overview
Overview and general information about Windows Azure Storage - what it is, how it works, and where you can learn more.
General Overview Whitepaper ...

In a previous post I explained an overview of the storage options you have for Windows Azure. I’d like to pull back a bit today – because Windows Azure is often used as a single term, you might not be aware it actually is composed of three components. These components work together, but can also be used separately.
Windows ...